Propositions for Museum Education

From the perspective of art educators, museum education is shifting to a new paradigm, which this collection showcases and marks as threshold moments of change underway internationally. The goal in drawing together international perspectives is to facilitate deeper thinking, making and doing practices central to museum engagement across local and global contexts. Museums as cultural brokers facilitate public pedagogies, and the dispositions and practices offered in 33 chapters from 19 countries articulate how and why collections enact responsibility in public exchange, leading cultural discourses of empowerment in new ways. Organized into five sections, a wide range of topics and arts-based modes of inquiry imagine new possibilities concerning theory-practice, sustainability of educational partnerships and communities of practice with, in and through artwork scholarship. Chapters diverse in issues, art forms and museum orientations are well-situated within museum studies, enlarging discussions with trans-topographies (transdisciplinary, transnational, translocal and more) as critical directions for art educators. Authors impart collective diversity through richly textured exposés, first-person accounts, essays and visual essays that enfold cultural activism, sustainable practices and experimental teaching and learning alongside transformative exhibitions, all while questioning – Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing?